The Tris McCall Report

Your Friends And Neighbors, October 15, 2002

Baby Dayliner -- High Heart And Low Estate

Baby Dayliner is a performer. The Brooklyn club is packed with hipsters, the curiosity-seekers, the creative and the created, musicians and artists, punk rockers, prog rockers, pop fetishists. They've watched the previous few acts with their arms crossed in the familiar "cool guy" stance, but now their bodies are in motion, hips swiveling, asses shaking. It's almost involuntary, but they're swept away -- motorcycle guys who've never danced in their lives, supercilious punk girls with active disdain for disco, all gyrating in motion, hands in the air. They're trying to catch the eye of the young man onstage, teasing him, singing back to him, exhorting him to push harder, give more, and, supremely in tune with the audience -- his audience, now -- he does!, head back, singing with passion, fury, and ruthless intelligence, cross-stepping, smiling wide, squeezing every drop of meaning out of each syllable. All arms in the air, now, shouts and whistles, the crowd dancing in a frenzy of recognition and pure excitement, and Baby Dayliner is whipping them up more; he turns, he shakes, he croons and raps over thunderous beats and bass, one man, one machine, in supreme syncronicity. And now everyone has lost their cool stance entirely, hands out, knees shaking, in thrall to the delirium of the moment. Is this the encore set? Nah, friend, the show's just started, and it's the closest thing the Williamsburg scene will ever have to their own homegrown Beatlemania.

Baby Dayliner is a writer. The songs are supremely literate -- Baby Dayliner draws from a formidable lexicon and an enormous repository of interesting and effective storytelling strategies. Yet intelligence is never on display for its own sake; instead, it's a tool for communicating sophisticated narratives. Some of the songs are missives, many are descriptive, almost all contain indelible, inspiring, and unforgettable language. "High Heart And Low Estate" finds its narrator under a seedy bridge with his girl where their makeout session is framed by the city's nefarious activity; as always, Baby Dayliner makes the most of the tension and the incongruity. "Beatdowns" is an open letter to an ex-girlfriend that employs a baseball metaphor intentionally extended to absurd lengths -- it's hilarious, but behind the obvious humor is a tragic meditation on the limits of vicariousness. Amusing, ironic, "Hoodlums In The Hit Parade" serves as a knowing anthem for Brooklyn artists, juxtaposing hip-hop hyperbole with standard Williamsburg discourse to surprising and enervating effect: "We're not obviously eloquent/nor have positions in the government/and that's a shame/'coz we got game", sung to the delight and identification of the local crowd.

Baby Dayliner is a musical mechanic, a pop song manufacturer, a fabricator of meaning from discarded parts and pieces. Drawing from sources as disparate as top-forty radio, underground hip-hop, european post-punk explorations, seventies disco, and mid-eighties synthpop, Baby Dayliner crafts songs that are undeniable in their immediacy and continually surprising in their melodicism and compositional cleverness. "Raid!" begins with a simple new order-style synthesizer pulse, and then builds effortlessly through a propulsive bridge before exploding into a rafter-rattling chorus. The altogether brilliant "Silent Places" fuses a huge, new romantic chorus to a verse that seems almost classically-inspired -- all over a backbeat both slamming and sublime. The thunderous "Sha" could be slotted today into heavy rotation on Hot-97 -- with the swagger and catharsis of Jay-Z's best tracks, Baby Dayliner emcees over beats reminiscent of DJ Premiere at his most incendiary. Here, as elsewhere, you will be amazed by the effectiveness and inventiveness of the beat programming -- Baby Dayliner understands his machines, and his ability to coax the maximum excitement out of them is unparalled.

Baby Dayliner is a revelation. He takes stages in clubs best known as maximum rock 'n' roll hangouts. He plays punk crowds, hardcore crowds, hip-hop crowds. He regularly follows bands with formidable wattage. He plugs in his Dr. Rhythm Section, walks to stage center, and proceeds to move the crowd. He opens eyes and blows minds. He broadcasts tropes and language from hip-hop and disco in settings where neither hip-hop nor disco are heard, and he sells it every time, without ever stooping to condescend to either form. He is making connections between cultural movements, bravely building bridges over formidable chasms, doing profound theoretical work, and all while getting busy and never forgetting to be entertaining. He is fundamentally a communicator, one who makes sure you hear every syllable he sings -- and his ever-growing audience hangs on every syllable. By no means is Baby Dayliner the only one-man act playing stages in new york city -- but he is by far the most intelligent, the most multifaceted, the most syncretic and single-minded. and by relentlessly challenging his audience, taking a lead and daring the crowd to follow, he makes a profound impact on every room he plays.

But now i've said too much. This act is brilliant, and it encapsulates all the best that the Williamsburg scene has to offer. Come and see for yourself.

Spiraling -- Transmitter

Remember when you were a kid, searching through the racks of sheet music in instrument stores for transcriptions of the songs you loved on the radio? (I'm assuming you're all in bands.) Remember how it felt finding the sheet music to, say, Billy Squier's Emotions In Motion, excitedly opening it, only to find that there really wasn't anything in those songs worthy of elaborate transcription? Remember how paltry it looked on the page, and remember how cheap you felt? Future fans of Spiraling won't ever have to encounter that problem. Tom Brislin writes from the kind of chord vocabulary we haven't seen in East Coast indie rock in years, and his catchy, intricate, and nuanced melodies seem to beg for transcription: his is an intensely musical act, comparable in its painstaking attention to harmonic detail to Duke-era Genesis. Brislin himself is a dextrous, imaginative organist and synthesist, able to execute flawless runs and swirling, electrifying arpeggios with flawless precision. Transmitter highlights his playing, but it never entirely dominates -- these are well-balanced and carefully crafted mixes, radio-amicable if not entirely friendly, welcoming and generous, defiantly quirky. A few of the tracks are straight-up, successful rockers, particularly "(get your own) Holy Grail" and the self-deprecating "This Is The Road". Those are fun singalong numbers, but I'm most compelled by the version of Brislin who immerses himself in sonic mayhem via his analog synths, best evidenced here by the terrific title cut and the superb, dizzying "Excellent Body". But "Lightning Strikes" will probably be the runaway favorite here -- built on an ingenious organ progression and a mesmerizing analog synthesizer hook, this is the kind of huge, ambitious pop song that used to be a staple on the FM airwaves (and surely will be again, and soon). Asia spent ten years and millions of dollars of David Geffen's money trying to write songs like these. When the prog-rock revival finally hits mainstream radio, expect Brislin and Spiraling to be at the forefront.

Little T & One Track Mike -- Fome Is Dape

Little T is hilarious, we all know that -- his entertainment skills are first-rate, he's a deft satirist, and he's got a willingness to pursue his own word-games into the deep, loopy stratosphere populated by the likes of Biz Markie and Dana Dane. What's less acknowledged, though equally spotlighted throughout Fome Is Dape, is Little T's poignant sense of his own alienation. Not since Skee-Lo has an emcee come on so willfully geeky and socially backward; even Aceyalone, "Mr. Outsider," rarely undercut his authority with such razor-sharp self-deprecation. It's a testament to Little T's courage (and deep confidence) that he gravitates toward subject matter that hasn't been featured in hip-hop since the early days of The Pharcyde: unrequited love, laziness and apathy, illness and persecution, misunderstanding and miscommunication, escape. There's not much braggadocio here, and even less harshness; Fome Is Dape inverts standard hip-hop tropes without ever dismissing them outright or condescending to the form. His gloss on every topic is always fundamentally humorous, but as with Imani and Fatlip's best narrative rhymes, there's always a dark undercurrent to every joke. Two tracks here ("Loosendin'" and "Only When It Rains") are straightforward unfulfilled-love stories, while much of the celebrated "Wings" is an internal discourse in which Little T attempts to riddle out his own feelings about relationships. "Guidance Counselor" and the brilliant "Kick In The Ass" turn the spotlight on the narrator's own inertia; on "Immune" he is hunted, and by "Deadman" he's emasculated, and ready to expire. "Shaniqua," the first single, stands as a perfect encapsulation of the fruitful tension between Little T's wicked humor and the deeper themes of disconnection articulated on Fome Is Dape -- the extended gag about a misguided and persistent crank caller masks the tragedy of the scenario; that of a loner haunted by the echo of a relationship that he never even had. The album culminates with "Sycamore Trees," a (mostly) serious autobiographical track about racism and hostility to difference in the sticks; here, the haze of superficial humor clears completely, and Little T's temerity and defiance are manifest. Throughout, the rhymes are supported by One Track Mike's startlingly efficient and authentic hip-hop production, much clearly inspired by the work of the Native Tongues and DJ Premier. Those who have seen Little T & One Track Mike's impossibly energetic and exciting live performances -- most of which boast a definitive lightheartedness and party vibe -- may be surprised by the emotional depth of this album. But then again, most fans have probably already come to the conclusion that when writing and performing talent is this apparent, anything is possible.

Double-Breasted -- Angst for the Mammaries

Despite the undeniable excellence of the Double-Breasted project and the clear intelligence of everybody involved, I was expecting substantial difficulty in translating the energy and charisma of the group's performances to disc. Strings are notoriously difficult to record, and I can easily imagine the astonished and bewildered look on the face of the studio engineer when Kristi Chmura hauled her enormous harp into the live room. But I guess it wasn't that way at all -- despite the ridiculous title, Angst for the Mammaries turns out to be a completely natural and entirely successful documentation of the sound and attitude of New Jersey's indie group of the moment. The interplay between Chmura's arch-seriousness and the riotous, hyperstylized approach of cellist Ardith Collins keeps the group far from the twin chamber-pop sandtraps of highbrow cliché and self-dramatizing schtick, and the seven-song EP is paced accordingly, with the two women alternating songs and lead performances, each framing and elaborating the efforts of her partner. I can't think of another area group with two writers and singers who complement each other so well.

Consequently, Angst for the Mammaries functions best when understood as a complete work rather than a collection of highlights, but hey, if it's highlights you're looking for, rest assured that you'll find some here. Personally, I'm most drawn to Collins's alternately loopy and outraged performances, delivered in a clipped, poised, vaguely aristocratic voice that is heavy on severe consonants and breathless imperiousness; "The Ketchup Song" and "Alto Cinco" are wide-eyed, uproarious, straddling satire and condemnation with assurance. Chmura's vision tends to be darker and more theatrical; still and crystalline, "Unresolved" carries a yearning that never becomes maudlin. On "Janus", the collection's closing track, the two singers raise their voices together to dazzling effect - simultaneously chastising and celebratory, gleeful and desperate, straining toward resolution and union. The Tori Amos crowd will inevitably go crazy for this.

Doubtless you are not part of the Tori Amos crowd (and who can blame you?), but you ought to pick up on it too. While much of local independent rock slowly strangles itself to death on its own conservatism, here is a group that manages to invert many of our most epidemic problems. Rather than bury their words beneath a patina of frequency-spectrum-saturating rhythm guitar, Double-Breasted bravely foregrounds their formidable and illuminating lyricism. In a state where so many singers both male and female do their level best to mimic the inflections of Eddie Vedder or Dave Matthews, Double-Breasted offers two unique and personal voices, recorded with clarity and care. Here, also, proceeding with good humor, irony, and logic despite the current fashion for poker-faced expressions of brain-dead sincerity, is a group with strikingly unusual arrangement concept -- a cultivated clearing in an enormous forest of indistinguishable pop-punk and emo bands. But perhaps most importantly, in a rock scene where female voices are rare to non-existent, Double-Breasted features two outspoken and articulate women, rupturing by their very presence the easy, endless homosocial flow of boy after boy in guitar band after guitar bands. It seems almost too manifest to say it, but I'll say it anyway: Collins and Chmura have supplied precisely what New Jersey independent music needs, and not a moment too soon. Here's hoping we can all recognize that.

Is Shaniqua here? Hell, no!